Influencer Tips

Either way, momfluence is a community built with you in mind. We are here to help you land more brand collabs and learn about tricks & tools so you put your best foot forward.

We are in this together and are dedicated to keeping you up to date on best practices that enable you to be best of class. When you win, we win too and so do our brand partners.

Our top three tips for getting the most out of our platform are:

1. Keep your profile updated (update it every month at least)
2. Check the marketplace weekly for new brand collaborations
3. Respond quickly to brand inquiries, even if it’s to decline them. You never know what campaign they or the agency running their account will have next.

The first step for each brand on momfluence is to search through our influencer database and favourite the ones that they want to work with. 

Finding the right people is by and large the hardest part of influencer marketing. Our database helps by allowing them to filter for specific characteristics so make it easy for brands to find you! 

Optimize your profile on momfluence with these tips:

You should have two goals when creating your profile – creating something that

1. a) lets brands easily find you when they are searching for their dream Momfluencer

and

1. b) gives brands enough information so they get an accurate sense of who you are, quickly.

We have designed your profile page purposely to highlight the most common information brands are looking for when deciding who to reach out to for their current campaign. 

Make use of every field and most importantly, keep it current. 

You can also make yourself easy to find, which means you will get more campaigns that actually interest you. 

You can do this by making sure the fields that are searchable by brands are full of keywords. 

These 4 fields are searchable by keyword for brands in our Discover Influencers section:

1. Hobbies / interests / life events
2. Favourite kids / family activities
3. Brands you love
4. Profession

For ex. a brand could enter “Teacher” and if you have this listed as your profession, your profile will come up.

This means that these are the best way to ensure you are approached for campaigns that you will love. Make these fields robust with your answers and make sure they are kept up to date.

With your IG profile you want to:

Keep it professional.

Make sure it’s professional or least make sure it resonates with the type of brand deals you would want (ie. if you are posted risque pics of you in your underwear, it’s doubtful any conservative clients will work with you. Lingerie companies wouldn’t have an aversion but a bank would.)

While almost everyone has some sort of religious affiliation, declaring your faith can lead to brands turning away. Brands have to appeal to people of all affiliations so it’s hard for them to align with people who display theirs. The cons of doing so may outweigh the pros, but it’s a personal choice for you to make.

Disclose your paid partnerships. If brands see that you are obviously posting sponsored content but not properly disclosing, they will be concerned that you will have lost your audience’s trust.

Include your location.

Put your town/city in your profile or at least tag your pictures regularly with your location. Many brands want geographically specific influencers and you miss out on offers if this info is hard to discover.

Make your bio link an interactive one.

You only get one shot with a link in your bio. We love Linkin.bio (so much so that we wrote an entire blog about it). 

It allows your feed to be an interactive landing page that you can easily link to any URL you want. This is great for brands because it directs your audience to the brand page for a much longer duration of time in comparison just changing the link in your bio for a few days. 

Brands love seeing these type of bio hacks especially when they help your audience get to know their company even more.

Brand collaborations are only effective when an influencer has the right connection with their audience, otherwise they are completely useless and go unnoticed. 

Here are some general tips for keeping your audience (aka.customers) happy:

• Respond to as many comments / likes as possible.
• Respond to all DM’s.
• When you are about to post, set aside an hour or two where you can be available to respond to engagement. 
• Post stories every day and make use of the fun features they have available. 
• Be open and vulnerable. People want to feel connected to you and the only way for this to happen is if you let them in. 
• Create some regular content and stick with it. Ie. #ootd. Familiarity is great for your audience. 
• Analyze your insights so you understand what is working.
• Try something new regularly. You’ll never know if you don’t try!

Treat your account like you would any other business – respond to brands quickly & professionally, treat your audience like your customers and do your best to make them happy!

That being said, engagement rate is still a very common number that brands want to know about each influencer they approach.

Having a low engagement rate is an almost guaranteed way to get passed by, especially if you have less than 50k following. 

The higher the following the lower the rate – the values change all the time but as of writing, a “good” engagement rate for someone under 10k followers is 4-6%, while someone over 100k is closer to 1.5%. 

The type of content you have also affects the rate as some types of content are more engaged with naturally than others. 

Just like every facet of the influencer business, improving your rate should be something on your mind even if it’s not the most important metric anymore. 

Take our list below and implement 1 or 2 each week:

Ask questions.
Use questions in your post captions to make it easy for your audience to engage. End each caption with a CTA (call to action) that invites the reader to engage somehow, whether it’s responding to a question with a comment, throwing up an emoji or double tapping if they agree with something you’ve said. 

Know thy numbers.
Analyze what works based on your reach and impressions. Your reach can tell you a lot, especially if you manage to make it onto the Explore page. Those posts will have a significantly higher reach so they will stick out. Figure out what about that post made it so popular and try to duplicate it over and over.

Post at peak hours.
Make sure to check your Instagram insights to see what your peak audience hours are, and post during those hours to make the most of your content. 

Use stories to drive in-feed post traffic.
Follow up in-feed posts with related stories that give your audience more insights into your message. It helps to drive interest and engagement, but go beyond throwing up a story of your post with a “new post” overlay. 

Stories are where you can be really creative, and even more personal. People love video, love extra content that gives them a way to get to know you and there is so much less pressure for perfection. Make sure you aren’t overlooking this strategy.

Reach is the total number of unique accounts that saw your content, while impressions, its cousin, is the number of times your content was viewed. Impressions are also important but to a brand, they want to know how many different people were exposed to the brand more often than how many times. 

How do you figure out your average reach? 

Take the last 10 posts, find the average reach and then divide this by your audience. 

As a rule of thumb, if you are under 15% reach, you need to re-work your angle because your content isn’t resonating with your audience. Over 30% is exceptional, so aim for 30% and even if you fall short, so long as you are above 15%, you are doing something right!

Having the courage to be vulnerable is the first step on the path to connecting. Anytime someone displays an act of courage, they are simultaneously accepting the feelings of vulnerability. 

This willingness to experience being vulnerable is so crucial to your audience truly connecting with you because they see you as authentic. 

We all know someone in our lives we would describe as a great person because they are true to themselves, not fake, not trying to impress people constantly. 

Authenticity makes us feel comfortable and it spans the entire human experience which includes the not so Gram worthy topics, conversations, etc. 

Accept that feeling vulnerable is something you experience on a regular basis as an influencer. This will benefit you hugely.

The authenticity gap exists every time an influencer posts sponsored content that doesn’t feel 100% in line with who they are / what their account is about. 

If you are going to make a career out of influencing, there are going to be many many times this will happen. 

This can occur whether you are a lover of the brand or not, or because you may not have ever touched on a topic related to the brand but do genuinely use/love it. Or the topic may be relevant to your regular content but you hadn’t used the brand prior to being approached for the campaign. 

There are so many reasons as to why this gap exists and there’s nothing more off-putting to your audience than pretending it doesn’t exist.

If you are going to work with a brand that is no longer a part of your life, or never was, it’s still okay to do so long as you are upfront and honest about it in your caption/video.

This may sound like backwards advice but hear me out. Let’s say you begin your influencer career in fashion, and as your business grows, so does your capacity to purchase some higher end brands. You get a brand deal from Old Navy and while you no longer shop there, you did back in the days when your business was just beginning. You can definitely take this partnership so long as you don’t try to pretend like Old Navy is your current favourite shop. Be honest about what your history with the company is and how it fit into your life at one point. It may have been a favourite back in the day and this will still resonate with people, far more than trying to pretend that you still include their items in your wardrobe. Or maybe you still wear their t-shirts, so touch on that. Talking about how you are grateful to be able to purchase clothes you always dreamed of being able to afford while still relying on their tried & true t-shirts is a great example of bridging that gap.

Push the boundaries, challenge yourself, get outside of your comfort zone. These are all great pieces of advice but sometimes they can be hard to turn into actionable steps. What can you do to foster growth? 

Throughout the day save posts that inspire you, even the ones that you think are outside of something you could create. 

Once a week, take a stab at something you saved, even if you never intend to post it. Whether this is an IGTV, a live stream, a post with a personal story…we all have things that are outside of our typical content and this can be a great place to learn & grow. 

While it can be tempting to engage in follow trains, they can do more damage than good. Of course every influencer wants to grow their following, and highlighting other great accounts that you love can seem like a win win for you & your followers. But there is an element of cheesiness and a risk of being seen as someone who cares more about growing their following than providing great content to their audience. A better way of achieving the same goal is to highlight these other accounts in your stories in an authentic way. This will grow your following, albeit more slowly, but result in a much more loyal audience.

Mastering the art of content creation is the single most important thing you can spend your time improving, as it is the gateway to everything else that comes with a growing audience. 

Content → engagement → follower growth → brand collabs → sales → revenue for you

Great content leads to engagement (likes, comments, saves, shares). 

Engagement leads to increased traffic / followers.

Having a large following results in brand opportunities and because of the great content & engaged audience, sales for the brand are inevitable, which all results in you being able to charge for collaborations. 

Phew…but you can see, it all started with content.

Now with the algorithm driven feed order, your most engaged audience will almost always see your post, so the timing isn’t as important. 

That being said, knowing the best time for your following is still important, as are all insights related to your account.

If you were a bricks and mortar business and you knew you had a large group of people walking by at 5pm every day, you’d be certain to be open for business. The same is true for influencers, even though it’s digital. Know your times and schedule in-feed posts during those windows on a consistent basis.

Tell a story
Captions are getting longer. You may have noticed this but it’s actually been studied platform wide with the caption lengths almost doubling since 2014 (150 characters in ‘14 to over 400 in ‘20). 

Influencing is only possible because of human connection, which results from storytelling. We relate to other people only through emotion, so without it being present in the majority of your posts, your audience isn’t going to be able to feel connected to you.

You can transfer emotion with shorter captions, but it’s easier to do with longer captions. 

Also, as more and more people move away from reading magazines, newspapers and watching TV, social media fills that gap so the longer captions aren’t a deterrent for some like they were in the early days. 

Own your space
Images that are vertical see more engagement because they take up more physical space on the feed and therefore get noticed by people scrolling through.

This isn’t to say that all of your images need to be vertical from now on, but if you mix these in every so often, check the insights and see if it makes a difference for you. Always be testing out new things to see what helps increase your reach.